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4.13. autofs

An updated autofs package that fixes several bugs and adds various enhancements is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The autofs utility controls the operation of the automount daemon. The automount daemon automatically mounts file systems when you use them, and unmounts them when they are not busy.

Bug Fixes

BZ#704935
The autofs utility did not reset the map entry status on a reload request. As a result, newly added map entries that had previously recorded a mount failure failed to work. With this update, autofs resets the map entry status on a reload request and map entries are mounted as expected.
BZ#704939
The autofs utility could have terminated with a segmentation fault when attempting certain mounts. This occurred due to a race condition between mount handling threads for mounts that had previously recorded a mount failure. The automount cache map entry is now verified to be valid.
BZ#704940
The automount(8) man page referred to a non-existent man page. This was caused by a typographical error in the code. With this update, the man page reference has been corrected and the man page is displayed as expected.
BZ#704929
Due to a deadlock, autofs could stop responding when attempting to mount map entries that were nested within maps. With this update, the underlying code has been changed and, where possible, nested map entries mount correctly.
BZ#704933
Prior to this update, automount could terminate unexpectedly with a pthreads error. This occurred because attempts to acquire the master map lock occasionally failed as the lock was held by another thread. With this update, the underlying code has been adapted to wait for a short time before failing.
BZ#704928, BZ#704927
When retrieving paged results from an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) server, autofs handled certain cases incorrectly, which caused the query to not obtain all results. This update adds the code that handles these additional cases.
BZ#704937
Prior to this update, if a key entry of an automount map began with an asterisk (*) sign, the daemon failed with a segmentation fault because the sign was not matched correctly. With this update, such asterisk signs are handled correctly.
BZ#704228
When using GSSAPI authentication, the fact that an incorrect authentication host name was being used caused the connection to fail. This update now gets the correct host name for the connection.
BZ#692816
automount was not performing sufficient sanity checks of server names in its configuration. This update corrects the configuration entry parsing.
BZ#700136
Error reporting for invalid mount locations was unclear. This update improves the error reporting.
BZ#703332
When an automount map key is present in a file map and is also present in an included map source, if the file map entry was removed and a lookup performed before a re-load was issued, the map lookup would have failed. This update corrects the logic used to determine if the lookup needs to continue into included maps.
BZ#718927
When reloading maps that include a combination of direct and indirect maps, it was possible for automount to deadlock due to incorrect lock ordering.
BZ#
There was inadvertent use of a small amount of GPLv3-licensed code from Samba in autofs. While this was permissible, it would have entailed explicitly relicensing autofs from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3", which is not intended for autofs at this time. Therefore, the Samba-derived code has been replaced in order to maintain the "GPLv2 or later" licensing status of autofs.

Enhancements

BZ#704416
This update adds the "--dumpmaps" option to the automount command, which allows you to dump the maps from their source as seen by the automount daemon.
BZ#704932
This update adds simple Base64 encoding for LDAP and thus allows hashing of the password entries in the /etc/autofs_ldap_auth.conf configuration file.
All autofs users are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which provides numerous bug fixes and enhancements.
An updated autofs package that fixes one bug is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The autofs utility controls the operation of the automount daemon. The automount daemon automatically mounts file systems when you use them, and unmounts them when they are not busy.

Bug Fix

BZ#787122
A function to check validity of a mount location was meant to check only for a small subset of map location errors. A recent improvement modification in error reporting inverted a logic test in this validating function. Consequently, the scope of the test was widened, which caused automount to report false positive failures. With this update, the faulty logic test has been corrected and false positive failures no longer occur.
All users of autofs are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which fixes this bug.